Soft Water
In the title story, an RAF pilot has crashed his plane and when he regains consciousness he appears to be back in England. Supposedly he is being tendered care in a hospital in coastal Brighton, but when a nurse mentions the difficulty of working with hard water, he recalls that Brighton is actually famously known for the softness of its water. This lapse becomes the driving force of his realization that he is still in German-occupied France and the whole situation is an elaborate ruse. The soft water becomes not just a significant clue, but serves a symbol of home in a narrow sense and a symbol of what the Allies are fighting for in a larger sense.
Katina
The title character of “Katina” is a little girl who has been orphaned as a result of German bombing of her small Greek village. The trauma serves to age her before her time as she is described as having the face “of an old woman who has hatred in her heart” and who shakes her fist and screams at German planes flying overhead. Katina becomes the symbolic personification of not just the Greek people but all those across the world welcomed the soldiers of the major nations of the Allies to their country to offer protection against fascist incursion which they could do on their own.
Smith
In the story “Someone Like You” Smith is a large Alsatian dog whom a pilot known as Stinker develops a close bond with while stationed in Malta in the story. One day he receives orders that the squadron is being sent to Egypt and must fly out with such rapidity that he has no time to find Smith before he left which left him, according to another pilot who is relating the story, “mad as a hatter.” This storytelling pilot also specifically indicates that the reason that Stinker goes mad over simply having to leave without the dog is that he “loved that dog as though it was his father and his mother and everything else he had.” It is this aspect of the story which indicates the full symbolic status of Smith. For the rest of his short life, Stinker lives in an illusion in which the dog is still his companion and always at his side. This “madness” is symbolic of the way that soldiers fighting wars in faraway lands all to some extent go mad as a hatter as they struggle to keep those they left behind close to them in some way at all times.
The Black Mamba
In “An African Story” a black mamba turns out to be the unlikely thief in the night stealing milk from a cow in a field. The story is told by a narrator reading from a story written by pilot told to him by an old man who took care of him after he crashed his plane in a remote part of Africa. The story the old man tells is about a feud with the man who killed his dog simply because he can’t stand the sound the dog makes when licking its paws. The upshot is that the dog-killer accused the old man of stealing the milk from his cow, but the old man discovers the guilty party is really a big black venomous snake who every night shows up to attach its mouth to the cow’s udders and slurp down the milk. In this tale of vengeance, the old man arranges for the dog-killer to be there unaware the next night and watches from afar as the mamba strikes him dead with a fatal bite.
All of this is told in a very realistic style and everything about it seems possible except for most important part: that a cow would willing allow an eight-foot-long snake to suck milk from its udders even if the snake were capable of doing at in the first place. But that is the most important part of the story as it becomes the symbolic stand-in for all those unlikely tales that soldiers spend the rest of their lives telling in which their claims of heroism must be taken at face value because, after all, who can prove it didn’t happen?
Joannis Spirakis
“Yesterday was Beautiful” is a very short story without a plot; it is really more of a sketch than a story. A pilot who survived ejection from his plane while under attack finds himself on a small Greek island that is eerily deserted. He is looking for a boat so he can return to the mainland and comes across an old man. When he asks him if knows of anyone who might have a boat he can use, he refers him to the home of a neighbor where he might find Joannis Spirakis. The pilot speaks with Mrs. Spirakis and asks where he might find her husband to which she responds by pointing to the old man he has just been talking to. The disconnect of Joannis speaking about himself in the third-person and not identifying himself to the pilot becomes symbolic of the way that war changes people from the way they were into something else. The stimulus for this change is not just war itself, but that Maria, the daughter of Joannis and his wife, has been killed during a German attack on the island.
